Investment booms and asset "bubbles" are often the consequence of heavily leveraged borrowing and speculations of persistent growth in asset demand. We show theoretically that dynamic interactions between elastic credit supply (due to leveraged borrowing) and persistent credit demand (due to...

In the U.S. economy over the past twenty five years, house prices exhibit fluctuations considerably larger than house rents and these large fluctuations tend to move together with business cycles. We build a simple theoretical model to characterize these observations by showing the tight...

In this paper, by utilizing the Poincaré–Bendixson theory and the Hopf bifurcation theory, we analyze both rigid-price and flexible-price nonlinear disequilibrium Keynesian macroeconomic systems, prove the existence of a persistent business cycle and derive the conditions for global...

We explore shocks to expected future productivity in a model with limited enforcement of financial contracts. A microfounded collateral constraint implies that good news about future productivity yield an increase in stock prices, available credit and a general economic expansion.

This paper argues that counter-cyclical liquidity hoarding by financial intermediaries may strongly amplify business cycles. It develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model in which banks operate subject to agency problems and funding liquidity risk in their intermediation activity....

We show that firms' nominal required returns to capital (i.e., their discount rates) are sticky with respect to expected inflation. Such nominally sticky discount rates imply that increases in expected inflation directly lower firms' real discount rates and thereby raise real investment. We...

We develop a model of self-fulfilling default cycles with demand externality a la Dixit- Stiglitz to explain the recurrent clustered defaults observed in the data. The literature reports that observable fundamental factors alone are insufficient to explain the cluster. A decline in aggregate...

This paper adds a highly-leveraged financial sector to the Ramsey model of economic growth and shows that this causes the economy to behave in a highly volatile manner: doing this strongly augments the macroeconomic effects of aggregate productivity shocks. Our model is built on the financial...

Standard theory implies that the discount rates used by firms in investment decisions (i.e., their required returns to capital) determine investment and transmit financial shocks to the real economy. However, there exists little evidence on how firms' discount rates change over time and affect...

This paper develops an RBC model where banks use short-term deposits to provide firms with long-term credit. The demand for long-term credit arises because firms borrow in order to finance their capital stock which they only adjust at infrequent intervals. We show that maturity transformation in...